The recent fallout over Pastor Jeremiah Wright and Sen. Barack Obama continues to create ripples in the presidential campaign. For many, Wright’s words were jarring as we heard them across radio airwaves, saw his impassioned gestures in the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, and discussed the media coverage surrounding this explosive story.

I think it might be instructive to place the relationship of the pastor and the senator in terms of the blues and gospel impulses in African American music.

Craig Werner, in his scholarship, offers some definitions of blues and gospel music. Blues music is essentially three heartbeats: fingering the jagged grain of one’s brutal experience; finding a near-tragic, near-comic voice to express that experience; and reaffirming one’s existence.

Many in the African American tradition, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, feel that blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.

Gospel music, the roots of the vast majority of black music and of much of American music in the 20th century, parallels blues in the first two heartbeats but is distinguished by the third: acknowledging the burden, bearing witness and finding redemption.

Mahalia Jackson, a queen of gospel, reminds us that gospel songs are songs of hope. “When you sing them you are delivered of your burden. You have a feeling that there is a cure for what’s wrong. It always gives me joy to sing gospel songs. I get to singing and feel better right away. When you get through with the blues, you’ve got nothing to rest on. I tell people that the person who sings the blues is like someone in a deep pit yelling for help, and I’m not in that position.”

Blues, the second heartbeat, is what we heard in Wright’s sermons. The blues impulse realizes that good and evil runs through each of us. So, we saw Wright doing a jagged riff-a blues riff-on these sound bites. African Americans need these blues riffs to deal with some of the brutality of trying to be in an America “that has never been.”

As Obama reminds us in his Lincolnesque opening line, “We the people, to form a more perfect union” have never quite gotten there collectively as African Americans. Some may have “arrived,” although as W.E.B. DuBois reminds us, what does it mean to “arrive?” Why did we feel we needed to get on the train in the first place?

These are not questions that should prompt unpatriotic responses, but call us to think more deeply about freedom and its meanings. Is it material wealth or is it the “enhancement of others” as Nelson Mandela reminded us in 1994? In America, a significant part of African American people are no closer to being a part of the “perfect union.” There must be a lament-a blues voice for those people.

I believe Obama, in his speech in Philadelphia, was drawing on the blues and gospel impulses in his remarks. Wright’s sound bites were blues bites, but Obama reminded us that the larger legacy of the pastor’s leadership was grounded in the gospel impulse.

Wright encouraged thousands to feed the poor, visit the sick, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison. And, I do believe that Obama is the embodiment of the gospel impulse-he’s aware of the deep felt needs, the burdens and tribulations of people and yet he remains relentlessly hopeful.

I am convinced this is one of his greatest attributes and makes him a special man for all Americans in this historical time. And, as he alluded in his closing remarks, he is prepared to use the jazz impulse to create a new America.

Ellison calls jazz a truly democratic musical form. Louis Armstrong reminds us that jazz music is the same song that is never played the same way twice. The jazz impulse is a member of the community; the individual virtuoso; as a “link in the chain of tradition.” Watch a jazz quartet hit the stage as a community and then, throughout the set, each member will take time to perform an individual riff.

Finally, the community comes back together to remind us that we are connected to the tradition of those before us. Jazz, an art form that constantly adjusts, improvises, and finds new ways, is a great gift to humanity and a testimony of the ever-creative human spirit. I believe that Obama, moving to a jazz impulse, is inviting us to imagine a new America in the 21st century.

I think the recent developments surrounding Wright and Obama might be making some of us uncomfortable with him. As humans, we must learn to live with paradox. The rose and the thorn. The ying and the yang. Something and nothing.

Lately, the question for me is not whether Obama is ready, but are we? I think Wright’s remarks, however troubling they might be, need to be weighed in the broader context of the African American experience in America.

Obama, who transcends the blues impulse and still remains connected to it, prompts the conversations that can redeem, reconcile and advance all of America. I, along with the African American story, audaciously hope we will have the courage to hear the jagged edges so we can move to hopeful places, to the America that can be.

Derrick Hudson is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at Metropolitan State College of Denver.